Belinda wrote: ↑Wed Jun 12, 2019 9:17 pm
Immanuel Can wrote:
No. It doesn't say that. It says, "The tree of the knowledge of good and evil," not "the tree of wisdom."
It's an excellent myth. 'Knowledge' in the Biblical sense does not mean wisdom or accumulation of facts. 'Knowledge' in the Biblical sense means experience. The thing about the Garden of Eden is that Adam did not experience choice until he was tempted to eat o the tree.
I like the naughty snake who , unknown to Adam, was probably planted by God, in order to make Adam fulfil his destiny as a man. After all, God made Earth as well as Heaven.
The scriptures are also rewritten many times and 'evolve' to reword things that favor the present beliefs reflected at the times of the rewrites. There is a rational secular explanation of the Adam&Eve story (&/or any subset of most scriptures of any religion). The tree is symbolic of the wisdom of the 'gods' or of Nature itself, whether it be knowledge of neutral fact or moral beliefs (such as Immanuel Can here holds). What is universally interpretable is at least "some knowledge" that makes us reflectively wish we didn't learn afterthefact. Because we as children dream of always being grown up, this is equally symbolic of us as humans as a whole wanting to learn about nature. But once we do, it may turn out that upon learning, we are doomed to be as equally responsible (like a god) for our maturity. We cannot undo what we learn without some brain damage or literal destruction of factors where we treat Adam as any subset of people with Eve as
that which follows this knowledge.
Knowing also includes knowing something ABOUT morality also.....such as that it is itself only artificial. ...Thus we are doomed to be responsible for creating and managing this ourselves. If, as I already
know, that the
naked truth of morality is that it is non-existent, this curses us for discovering that the illusion of right and wrong is itself 'dead' now relative to our naive child-like state. Thus we retrospectively regret this and wish we were still the young and naive child who just would have simply been better off not knowing.
As to this discussion though, if this itself at least relates to the problem of 'evil', then many contradictions still exist logically. These don't require looking to the scriptures as any argument with respect to apologetic/skeptic debates as it is purely logical:
If a Supreme being exists (as that of the Bible), then for it to be absolutely good, why and how would it permit humans a choice to have that goes BEYOND its 'domain' of reality? The claim that we are given free will by this 'god' is equally removed from religion where we redefine God to "NATURE" itself. This is the 'deterministic' problem related to physics. Thus this question stands valid about 'free will' even if there is no God.
But IF we treat Nature as some particular interpreted 'God', especially if it is presumed 'good', then the question of WHY it would permit us 'free will' is odd. Does this
god itself have free will? A lot of interesting questions arise.
